Convention and creativity, the establishment of order and subversion, pluralism and system, forms of thought, market forms, forms of speech - the category of genre touches on fundamental questions of literature and art, philosophy and popular culture. This volume brings together classic positions of genre theory between structuralism and post-structuralism with prominent voices from the current discussion, particularly from French and Anglo-American perspectives, into a thematic dialogue for the first time. The reader includes key texts on the subject by Peter Szondi, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara Johnson, and Franco Moretti.